Description

The novellas covered in our SDG are "a sublime reading experience," in the words of Junot Díaz. "These novels testify to the extraordinary range, profound intelligence, and indefatigable weirdness of '50s American science fiction." Jonathan Lethem adds, "Here's the heart of the heart of where those who take American science fiction would want to begin--the genre's equivalent of Hollywood's classical period, and the books [that] subsequent creators like Thomas Pynchon and Stanley Kubrick used to bend their brains . . ."

In Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), for example, a group of damaged individuals finds a strange new fulfillment in what may be the next stage of evolution. One of the first women to make her mark as a science fiction novelist, Leigh Brackett in The Long Tomorrow (1955) pits anti-urban technophobes against the remnants of a civilization that destroyed itself through nuclear war.

We include one ringer: a dazzling novella by Rachel Ingalls from the 1980s that changed the B.E.M. [bug-eyed monster] paradigm.

Lisa Yaszek, ed., The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin. Library of America. 2018. This is FYI—worth being aware of, but we won't draw on the book in the current SDG. Similarly, in the fall of 2019, the Library of America is scheduled to release another anthology edited by Gary Wolfe, devoted to American science of the 1960s.